| People are not machines. Machines are not people. But I'll take your bait: I grew up close to a city, (Worcester MA,) with plenty of weirdo streets like San Francisco, and had plenty of teenage friends who lived in the city or travelled through it. Needless to say, we didn't get behind the wheel for the first time in Worcester. We stayed in calmer streets until we were ready. When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test. (I should also point out that, at the time, Worcester had a very serious problem with unlicensed drivers.) Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision. But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human. What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles. |
Am I to assume you never made a single mistake while doing so?
Of course not. Learner drivers stall, they forget turn signals, they don't keep up well with the flow of traffic. That is fine, that's all part of learning and perfectly normal.
> Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision.
I don't think that is clear at all. Sure, they're making mistakes, but so did you and I and everyone else that ever learned to drive.
> But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. Driving a car is not a "right" that all humans have, it's a privilege that can be quickly taken away.
Everyone is afforded the opportunity to learn at some point, and we need self-driving vehicles to have that opportunity too. Fast forward 20 (or whatever it is) years to when self-driving vehicles are much, much safer, they mean long-haul truckers don't have to be away from home in an unsafe and unhealthy profession, they mean less vehicles on the road, etc. etc.
Society NEEDS those benefits, and if we never give the self-driving vehicles the opportunity to learn, we'll never get there.
> What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles.
Absolutely, those are very important discussions to have. They are being had, by people in a position to make those decisions. Like a million things in our society, if you don't like the decisions they're making, you need to get yourself into that position.